

CMOs are facing a barrage of new challenges around acquisition and loyalty due to evolving customer behaviours and the accelerating shift towards e-commerce due to the pandemic.
Sense check your approach with likeminded industry experts, sharing insight on business-critical challenges and disruptive technology and drive your industry forward collaboratively.
Connect with 70+ senior Marketing leaders for a curated agenda focused on tackling your current business critical challenges and driving industry forward. Our summits are designed to help you:
Build new connections with likeminded senior leaders
Stay current with emerging business trends
Understand the impact new technology can make
De-risk new projects by gaining a broad range of insights
Accelerate key projects through meaningful new partnerships
Downloadable and actionable takeaways
09:00 - 09:20
Intro & Challenger Panel - 3 Roundtable moderators
09:20 - 09:50
Cause Marketing for Social Impact around the World: Global Best Practices
Did you know that what is good for the brand can also be good for the society as a whole? Santhi Ramesh, CMO International shares how her teams around the world have engaged consumers and communicated brand values, while driving meaningful social impact. You will hear how Hershey has embraced diversity and equality as a social cause to rally behind and launched a brand campaign across multiple markets. Specifically, how The Hershey company has:•Celebrated Women by breaking stereotyping across multiple fields•Curated content to increase engagement and•Garnered trust through an eco-system of partnerships
09:55 - 10:35
Next-Gen Consumer Marketing
The online behaviours that were pandemic accelerated are becoming permanent, as now more than half of the US population is a Millennial, Gen Z or younger. Authenticity, short, video content, and experiences are what they crave digitally. Shoppable video commerce and immersive, interactive live streams are a $300bn industry in China. These discovery and shopping behaviours are quickly moving west to the US, where the market size is expected to double in the next year. How are you responding to this growing demographic’s digital desires? Learn from Vincent Yang, Co-founder and CEO of Firework, about how to shift your storytelling, your customer engagement experiences and your data collection to own the audiences of the future.
10:35 - 10:45
10:45 - 11:45
Track 1: Whole Brand Thinking: Is it Time to Rethink the Role of Brand?
The pandemic forced brands, employees, and customers to rethink their priorities and approach. With this rethink, comes the opportunity to do things differently and better. Better for people, for society, and for business. One new paradigm is the Whole Brand approach, treating everything an organization does as the brand. According to The Whole Brand Project, so called ‘whole brands’ are twice as likely to be recommended as their fractured competitors, with a 40% increase in market share and employee satisfaction running 85% higher. Is it time for a rethink?
Track 2: Cutting Through the Noise: Reaching Customers in the Crowded Marketplace
With sales and marketing teams flocking to virtual platforms, assisted by increased use of automation and efficiency tools, the result has been a massive increase in the volume of messaging reaching consumers and prospects. Buyers are bombarded with adverts, impersonalized messages, alongside security threats such as phishing messages, and all their work and social network chatter. So how do you break through?
Track 3: Predicting (and optimising for) Demand
When the pandemic pushed everyone online, traditional tools for predicting demand became less reliable and the data became harder to interpret. How do we forecast demand in the new reality? What do we do with those forecasts? This roundtable explores how consumer behaviour has changed and what strategies you can implement to (a) predict demand and (b) optimise your marketing channels (and spend) to tap into that demand.
11:50 - 12:20
The Role of Marketing Technology Partnerships in Scaling Innovation
Lifestyle Medicine is an emerging category with a proven potential to positively impact consumer health and wellness and reduce healthcare costs. Blue Shield of California leads the category with an innovative direct-to-consumer (DTC) platform offering digitally accessible tools and services to help enrollees and employees take control of their own mental and physical well-being. This discussion will highlight best practices and key lessons from a close collaboration between a marketer and a marketing technology partner in their joint pursuit to bring innovation to the DTC marketplace.
09:00 - 09:10
09:10 - 09:40
Experience: The New Brand
09:45 - 10:25
A Picture Lasts Forever: Unlocking the Long Term Value (LTV) of your Marketing Assets
What happens when we treat our marketing assets as true investments, with lifetime value and ROI. This is, after all, the brand art that presents us to the world. We dream it up, create it, put it everywhere all at once, and then…on to the next campaign? Have we planned to get the most out of our content, as growth engines, relationship builders and brand drivers? Have we really unlocked its long-term power?
10:25 - 10:35
10:35 - 11:35
Track 1: Whole Brand Thinking: Is it Time to Rethink the Role of Brand?
The pandemic forced brands, employees, and customers to rethink their priorities and approach. With this rethink, comes the opportunity to do things differently and better. Better for people, for society, and for business. One new paradigm is the Whole Brand approach, treating everything an organization does as the brand. According to The Whole Brand Project, so called ‘whole brands’ are twice as likely to be recommended as their fractured competitors, with a 40% increase in market share and employee satisfaction running 85% higher. Is it time for a rethink?
Track 2: Cutting Through the Noise: Reaching Customers in the Crowded Marketplace
With sales and marketing teams flocking to virtual platforms, assisted by increased use of automation and efficiency tools, the result has been a massive increase in the volume of messaging reaching consumers and prospects. Buyers are bombarded with adverts, impersonalized messages, alongside security threats such as phishing messages, and all their work and social network chatter. So how do you break through?
Track 3: Predicting (and optimising for) Demand
When the pandemic pushed everyone online, traditional tools for predicting demand became less reliable and the data became harder to interpret. How do we forecast demand in the new reality? What do we do with those forecasts? This roundtable explores how consumer behaviour has changed and what strategies you can implement to (a) predict demand and (b) optimise your marketing channels (and spend) to tap into that demand.
11:40 - 12:10
Unifying Data and Creativity: The Rise of Intelligent Creative
As 2022 sets off to be another unprecedented year, marketers are eager to understand the shifts in consumer behavior and how technology can be leveraged to improve business results. With the demise of 3rd party cookies and the rise of first-party data, marketers can now unpack not only the what in their creative, but also the why to directly improve ad performance. Join VidMob CMO Andrea Ward as she discusses how data can be used to turn creative insights into action.
09:00 - 09:10
09:10 - 09:40
09:45 - 10:25
Revenue by Design
Go-to-Market planning is no longer just an art. It's a science. We will explore how AI is changing the game creating closeable business and discuss the six steps that take the guesswork out of GTM planning and execution.
10:30 - 11:30
11:35 - 12:20
Consumers First: Why Trust and Brand Authenticity Matters
Riot Games has thrived off a player-focused mentality with their flagship global hit, League of Legends. Riot has since expanded over the past decade to include massive global hits like VALORANT and most recently, its first animated series on Netflix, Arcane. In a mission to become the “most player-focused game company in the world,” how has Riot evolved their marketing strategies to reach new players and ensure current players continue to have great experiences in-game and beyond? In this session, join Jason Bunge, Riot’s CMO, and Francine Li, Riot’s VP of Brand Management and Marketing, as they explore how Riot is elevating the brand experience for its players, diving into key themes of trust, authenticity, adaptability and what it means to put consumers first as we think about marketing for the future of games and entertainment.
Engage with a virtual live audience just as you would at a physical event and create meaningful conversations.
The ultimate live polling and gamification tools, keeping your audience engaged.
Enabling our team to help you control your session experience.
Interactive quizzes to gamify your session
Content and insight from industry experts when it matters most
There is no cost associated with attending a GDS Summit. In return, we ask that all senior executives in participation attend for the full duration to ensure that all attendees get maximum value and insight from the interactive roundtables, live Q&As and breakout networking sessions.
Our digital summit portfolio is designed to bring together senior decision makers from large global businesses and innovative disruptor brands to drive industry forward through addressing business critical challenges collaboratively.
If you’re keen to build new connections with likeminded leaders, de-risk your projects through new insight and establish new partnerships that can accelerate your projects then apply to attend today.
Complete our ‘apply to attend’ form on the event page if you’re interested in attending the summit and you meet our application criteria. A member of the GDS team will then reach out to run you through the programme and event format and discuss your participation.
On stage: co-host a panel discussion with a group of likeminded senior executives or host a solo keynote presentation. Both slots include elements of interactive audience Q&A
Off stage: become a roundtable moderator, leading the discussion with the same cohort of executives for the duration of the summit around a specific topic you’ve agreed to focus on during the roundtable session.
We can tailor a partnership package to help meet your business objectives. This might include brand awareness, driving traffic to your site or quality editorial content via exclusive interviews and Q&As with our executive audience. Enquire today for more information.
Still have a question contact us below
You will leave the summit with best practices to immediately apply back to your organisation and new connections from meaningful conversations.
If you haven’t been to a GDS Digital Summit, you will be incredibly impressed. It’s far more engaging than most digital event experiences. It’s a very interactive environment.
I connected with peers that I know I’ll stay in touch with, including suppliers which have presented a fantastic opportunity for 7-Eleven Global in the future. It may well be the most valuable summit I’ve attended in many years
Thank you so much! Great Summit - an outstanding 3 days that culminated in this Award ... I am humbled and honored. Congratulations to you all for pulling off a Hybrid Summit with Augmented Reality features that are truly unparalleled in the Industry! Collaborative, Interactive & showcasing leading edge technology ... GDS Summits really set the bar so high that a return to physical conferences might be re-evaluated in the Industry. You are an amazing Team of Professionals & I am truly honoured to have been a part of this Summit.